Cloud Solution Architect @ Microsoft

Networking

During the last years as an architect for Azure services, there is a set of questions and areas that always come-up, you will find here the reference materials I use to answer RFP or customer enquiries. This post assumes you already have some Azure expertise in the subjects covered, but are in search of good reference materials for documentation purposes.

Networking and connectivity

When you design a solution running in Azure, it will most of the time run on Virtual Networks, you can connect those to:

Your datacenter via IPsec VPN: you use the internet to transport IPsec-encrypted packets. Since it’s the internet, there’s no SLA on the link availability, but the IPsec gateway is backed by a 99.95% SLA and the speed can go up to 1 Gbps.

Your datacenter via ExpressRoute: it’s a private connection, SLA-backed by your service provider up to 99.95%. The speed can go up to 10 Gbps if necessary.

Internet via a Public IP: that public IP endpoint is highly available, load balanced if needed, protected by our DoS protection service. Those operations are done by Azure but you can leverage Network Virtual Appliancesfrom the marketplace in order to add additional features like layer-7 inspection. If you want to use WAF-as-a-Service, you can also leverageAzure Application Gateway.

High availability, Disaster Recovery and SLA

When you build solutions on Azure, your choose the physical location of your data, which is replicated on 3 hard disk drives (based on Locally Redundant Storage), it can be replicated to another region in order to offer additional redundancy in a location with hundreds miles from the previous (3 additional copies of your data).

Cross-regions: by duplicating the first deployment in another region. You replicate the data using application-level replication orAzure Site Recovery, then you load balance the solution using Traffic Manager.

For all Virtual Machines that have two or more instances deployed in the same Availability Set, we guarantee you will have Virtual Machine Connectivity
to at least one instance at least 99.95% of the time.For any Single Instance Virtual Machine using premium storage for all Operating System Disks and Data Disks, we guarantee you will have Virtual
Machine Connectivity of at least 99.9%.

We guarantee that at least 99.9% (99% for Cool Access Tier) of the time, we will successfully process requests to read data from Locally Redundant Storage (LRS), Zone Redundant Storage (ZRS), and Geo Redundant Storage (GRS) Accounts.

Datacenter operations & compliance

Azure will very likely exceed any possible best practices and compliance regulation level that you see in a customer-run datacenter. Azure does not usually allow customers to directly audit against best practices, however we are working to certify Azure against the most relevant certifications, in the world, regionally, and locally as well as the most strict industry standards.

Threat protection, detection and incident response

How does Microsoft protect instances, how does Microsoft and I do incident response? Is there a DoS protection service include and IDS/IPS? Can I or a partner conduct penetration testing to a solution in Azure?

Operations Excellence

How do I operate, manage, an environment in Azure, how do I manage separation of roles and duties, how is done RBAC?

Customers can integrate their on-premises Active Directory with Azure Active Directory and then manage, delegate access using RBAC. When customer use Azure Active Directory, they can use all feature of Azure Active Directory Premium and also enable Just in time admin, which will elevat